2 The Stages of the Creative Process
OER source:Wikibooks. Creativity – An Overview/Creativity. CC BY-SA license.
For many people, creativity feels like a nebulous, mysterious, instantaneous inspiration. The ancient Greeks, for example, believed creativity was granted by nine goddesses known as Muses. At the beginning of many Greek plays, characters will invoke the Muses to ask for their inspiration and guidance. Even today, we often describe creativity as a lightning bolt or a lightbulb turning on.
But study into the creative act has revealed that great ideas are not, in fact, due to nine goddesses atop Mt. Olympus.
One of the first scholars to document the creative process was Graham Wallas. In his 1926 work Art of Thought, Wallas examined the process that goes on in the mind as we are in the act of creating or thinking creatively. Graham noticed that creative ideas do not come all at once, fully formed and perfect. Instead, new ideas develop in certain steps and stages that build upon one another.
Wallas used his observations to present one of the first models of the creative process. In the Wallas stage model, creative insights and illuminations may be explained by a process consisting of 4 stages:
- Preparation
- Incubation
- Illumination
- Verification
Over the next few chapters we will explore each of these stages in-depth, but let’s take a quick look at each stage.
Preparation: This first stage is the preparatory work on a problem that focuses the individual’s mind on the problem and explores the problem’s dimensions. It’s both active and passive, and can be a winding exploration or a direct searching, or all of the above.
Incubation: This is where the magic happens, where the problem is internalized into the unconscious mind and nothing appears externally to be happening. This stage is key to finding truly new ideas, because it allows our subconscious to make connections between previously unrelated things.
Illumination: The famous lightning-bolt lightbulb-on, apple-bonking-Newton-on-the-head moment where our conscious mind recognizes the new connection of ideas. In this moment we gain insight, and the creative idea bursts forth from its preconscious processing into conscious awareness
Verification: At this stage, after working feverishly on the idea, we show it to others. Here is where the idea is consciously verified, elaborated, and then applied. At this stage, we get to see if the idea works or not.
Take a moment to personalize these four stages outlined by Wallas. Think of something creative you’ve done, or an idea you’ve had, or an ingenious solution to an issue that you put into practice.
Preparation: Did you have some background in the area your idea came from? Did you also do some learning or research?
Incubation: Perhaps you put the idea aside, either due to forgetting about it or from reaching a point of frustration with the learning and preparing you were doing. Did your unconscious mind keep thinking about it?
Illumination: Did you have a moment where the idea seemed to just land inside your mind? Were you blessed by the Muses? What did you do with that inspiration—did you get to work on it? How did you move from the moment of inspiration to having a prototype of the idea existing?
Verification: Did you take the leap and show your completed new idea to someone or a group of people? Did you test it out somehow? Did it work?? If so, great! If not, think about what came next: Did you perhaps circle back to the first stage of the creative process to keep working on it?
